Shining a bright light into the dark corners of the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes, and pitfalls. Also providing advice for writers, industry news and commentary, and a focus on the weird and wacky things that happen at the fringes of the publishing world.

Law Firm Investigates Author Solutions Inc.

Authors using Author Solutions have complained of deceptive practices, including enticing authors to purchase promotional services that are not provided or are worthless, failing to pay royalties, and spamming authors and publishing blogs/sites with promotional material.

They're calling for contact from authors who believe they've been the victims of these and/or other deceptive practices. The contact form is here.

Giskan Solotaroff Anderson & Stewart specializes in, among other things, consumers and small businesses in class actions. Where possible, they enter into contingency fee arrangements--i.e., they take a percentage of the winnings rather than a fee. Given that Author Solutions is now owned by Pearson, there are some deep pockets here, which may make a lawsuit more feasible than it has been in the past. (To my knowledge, no lawsuit has actually been filed; this is a preliminary investigation only.)

I've blogged about ASI and its questionable practices a good deal over the past few years. For background, here's a selection of my posts:

5 comments
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The only issue here is the long, ugly history of law firms taking on these kinds of suits because they get a huge cut of the settlement while the people they are supposedly suing for get a token payment. Worse, these settlements don't stop the offending party from offending.

A good example was the suit against the Atkins people in the late 1990s for marketing supposedly "low carb" bars that were actually full of carbohydrate due to sleazy labeling. The firm got a bunch of money, the people who bought the bars got a refund--if they still had proof of purchase of the bars from 5 years earlier. And Atkins is still selling bars that use deceptive labeling to hide the fact they are full of substances that metabolize into carbohydrate.